By the early 1960's, the Baby Boom Generation was beginning to be a cultural force everywhere in the United States, even down to my little universe of Barbara Lane.    There were over a dozen of us on Barbara Lane, born from 1948, to the addition of my baby sister Joanne in 1964, with most of us concentrated in the earlier years of the Boom.  The addition of new families had tapered off and the gang of kids was set.

There were a couple of very rough times for our family in the late 50s and early 60s. My Dad worked for a factory that manufactured chrome-plated parts for General Motors.  It was the biggest chrome plating factory in the world and my Dad helped make 1950s cars some of the most beautiful cars ever made - the big Cadillacs, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs and Chevys with giant chrome bumpers and grills and logos, right down to radio trim and window cranks. In 1957 it was as if everybody bought a brand new '57 Chevy, by the millions.  Mr. Calkins down the road bought one, a fuel injected beauty.  It was the peak year.  But then in 1958 nobody bought a new car.  The 58 Chevy was a dog.   The Edsel bombed.   My Dad got laid off from the factory for months, after having only the year before getting all kinds of overtime.

1959 Cadillac Fleetwood.  It's possible my Dad polished the chrome on this car. 

Then in 1960 there was a big recession across the entire economy, and things were even worse.  My Dad told me he had 15 years at the plant and now he found himself low man on the totem pole.  His bosses kept him on as long as they could because he was such a good worker. They even kept him at work as a janitor, polishing the big executive board room table and running a floor machine, but then they had to let him go as well.  My Dad was out of work for nearly a year.  We ate government surplus cheese and government surplus corn meal.  Corn meal mush for breakfast.  Ugh.   This was when we got stories about Dad having salt pork for dinner every day during the Great Depression.   Things were grim.  I had to wear my Dad's shoes to school.  They flopped around and I couldn't run or they'd come off. Our rubber buckle boots broke buckles and we had to walk around with them hanging open at the top.  For Christmas I got a cheap little stamped metal car from Japan, suitable for a two-year old.  It was heartbreaking, but I knew better than to complain.   I cannot imagine my parents' sadness, worry and disappointment, but they had been through even worse times, and my Dad had a deep faith that God would turn things around.  He sought out work wherever he could find it, working for local farmers picking potatoes or plowing big fields with a huge John Deere tractor and six plows.  He took savings and went in with my uncle Gil and bought a quarter of a beef or a pig and butchered it on our kitchen table so we would have meat.  Eventually things did get better

In the early years our lower end of Barbara Lane was a dirt road .  The snow would pack down and make for excellent sledding.  One of my favorite Christmas presents was a long sled.  My brother Gary got one too, his was a Flexible Flyer, which had superior steering capability.  Our sledding hill started at Mac's garage, just up from our trailer, where the road took a steep fall toward the bottom of the hill.  The game was for several of us to get a running start, belly flop onto the sled, and try to grab the rear of the runner of the opponent's sled and yank it sideways, causing the opponent to spin out and crash.  (One time Jack Rice was holding his sled at the top of the hill and he stuck his tongue on the metal - literally - just like the scene in The Christmas Story.  Hilarious) .

Seated  - Stuart, Joanne.  Standing - Richard, Gary, Pamela, Marilyn, Lorraine

We also had short sleds which were actually more maneuverable, but your entire legs stuck out the back, so they weren't as comfortable to ride. A good run would take you a couple of hundred yards to the bottom of the hill. Periodically we would take steel wool to the runners and put wax on them.   

The downside of having such excellent sledding conditions was that the road was like an inclined ice skating rink.  The next morning as the men headed out for work, they would reach the steep part in front of our house and the tires would start spinning.  Sometimes the car would start sliding backward, the danger being that it would slide off into the ditch, so the driver would ease back, down the hill, all the way to the bottom, to get a running start.  With a running start, most of the time they would make it to the top of the steep part, to where the road was paved, and be on their way.  

Where the road was paved, the snow would melt off much more quickly than where the road was dirt.    That spelled doom for our fabulous sledding fun, because after several years the County paved the road.    That meant several things.  First, it was no longer a private road, so the County plowed the snow instead of all the neighbors pitching in and hiring a private snow plow guy. (One of my favorite sights was our snow plow guy barrelling down Barbara Lane at night with his bright headlights and snow flying all over the place)  Second, it meant we got a street address - 7775 Barbara Lane - and mail delivered instead of having our mail boxes in a row way up on the Main Road.  Third, they constructed a bus turnaround at the bottom of the hill where the bus could back in and head back up the hill.  That meant the bus picked us up right at our house instead of us having to walk all the way up to the Main Road.

Fourth, and worst, it meant the end of our sledding fun.   The first winter after they paved the road we ran down the hill, belly flopped onto the sled, and  came to a screeching halt in about two feet.  The sharp little gravel pieces in the asphalt grabbed the runners like little vice grips.  Even with a heavy snowfall, after the plows came there was never enough cover over the gravel.  What. A. Bummer.   One of our most favorite winter things was gone.  Our sleds stood idle, the runners rusted, the wood weathered and wasted away. 

But before it was all over, my brother Gary and I one moonlit night ventured out . The snow was deep in the fields and it had melted on the surface and frozen over again, which meant you could walk on top of it without breaking through the crust.   The snow was deep enough to cover the weeds, and the hills were an unbroken sea of smooth sparkling crystals in the moonlight.  This was something very special.  We hiked over the crusted snow to the old farmer's field, to the top of the hill.  We ran together and belly flopped onto our sleds, and we coasted down the hill for a half a mile at least, and then climbed up and did it again.  We sailed in the silent moonlight over the sparkling crystals, with just the whisper of our sliding runners.  We walked home together, not talking, just knowing we had had a glorious experience.

Summer came, and by now I had somehow acquired a big box of John Deere farm toys.  Tractor, plows, hay baler, manure spreader, and a big combine harvester, all bright John Deere Green and Yellow, with wheels that turned and parts that spun, and I played with them in the dirt, but I found that I was getting too old to play with toys, and in a while they mostly stayed in the box.  I got more interested in buying model cars and gluing them together, then giving them a perfect paint job with spray paint, putting flame decals on them, and trying to figure out how to attach a model airplane gas engine on them to turn them into a real operating dragster.  Without any tools to make it happen, it remained a fantasy.  One day my little 3-year old brother Stuart got hold of them while I was out, and the lesson was "Don't leave them around where he can get to them",  which was really driven home when my sister Marilyn ran into the house one day and plopped herself down on the couch - on top of my balsa wood airplane model  which I had carelessly left there.  Crunch and bye-bye balsa.  

Our house was built with concrete blocks painted pink,  so it looked like a pink concrete bunker.  One day a workman showed up and set up his saw horses and started working.  Mom and Dad had decided to put aluminum siding on the house, which greatly improved the appearance of our home.   My Mom caught me alone one day as the work was going on and gave me a present.  It was a little transistor radio with an ear plug speaker - now they call them ear buds, but this had only one - mono. It was a promotional gift from the siding company.  Now I could listen to rock and roll on radio stations WNDR and WOLF.  That little transistor radio was now and for years my constant companion.  The little 9-volt battery would last for a week or so - even if I let the radio run all night after I fell asleep.  

New Siding      

It was 50 cents for a new battery.  I never had an allowance.  I made money baby sitting, selling worms, and helping my older brother with his paper route.    My only purchases were a few model cars, candy, hot dogs, donuts, and a fresh battery for my radio.  I took my radio with me out in the fields looking for and picking wild berries for my Mom to make strawberry shortcake and pies.    We made a deal.  If I picked the berries, Mom would make a pie.  Berry pie is my all time favorite.  

The farmers' fields surrounding Barbara Lane had long ago contained some orchards and berry fields that had reverted to wild apples and berries.  There was also an ancient cherry tree that was by now nearly 50 feet high.    Every year was different - some years there were lots of fruit, others not as much.  Some years the apples would weigh the tree down or the cherry tree would be full of cherries.  The trick was to get to them before the birds did. One time I was high up in the cherry tree picking the cherries at the very ends of the branches when a dark blur passed in front of my eyes.  My hands shot out, I was holding a branch, and my feet were dangling.  I had fallen out of the tree, high enough to break a leg, but I'd caught a branch on the way down.  Lucky me. 

Most of the time I was on the ground looking for berries and picking them.  I could sit for hours in a strawberry patch gently picking the tender little red berries, or standing in a patch of black caps, which popped off easily, or thumb-sized blackberries that I called huckleberries. They took a little more persuasion but the berries were much larger so you didn't have to pick as many .  The rarest of all were red raspberries, so soft, but easy to pop off like black caps, and with a perfume that wafted out around them.  I had to search far and wide to find red raspberries, which are actually a beautiful pink color.  They were my Mom's favorite, a rare treat.   All the while I would be listening to the Ronettes or the Beach Boys or Roy Orbison on my little radio.   Nirvana.

Summer's end in 1963 meant that I inherited my older brother's two paper routes.     One was the Herald Journal, an evening daily published in Syracuse, and the second was the Messenger, a weekly local published out of my home town of Baldwinsville.   The rival daily newspaper was the Post-Standard, a morning paper I did not deliver because I could deliver the Herald Journal after school.    The paper man would drop a bundle of papers into a wooden box on the Main Road.   I got home from school, put on a heavy hoodie and a jacket, pulled on my hunting boots over heavy woolen socks, and hiked up the road with my paper bag on my shoulder.  I put enough papers in my bag to deliver the first part of my route, which was about ten houses on the Main Road, Route 370.  Then I would circle back to the paper box to get the rest of the papers for Barbara Lane, which was a little over twenty houses.  So a total of a little over thirty houses, which is not a big paper route, but it was spread out over a couple of miles, and took over an hour to deliver

In the winter, I delivered papers in the dark, and sometimes it was so cold that at the first house I would deliver, Mrs. Towsley would bring me in to warm up and sometimes give me an oran ge.

The weekly Messenger came on Thursdays, and it took about two hours to deliver because my route stretched out over Route 370 for a half a mile on either end of my daily route - all the way to Dewitt Drive on one end where Guy Gardocki and Barbara Bachman - the other half - lived .  That meant on Thursdays I had to deliver both routes

The absolute worst was the Sunday paper.   They were and inch and a half thick, weighed a ton, and I could barely fit them all in the bag.   I scoff at western paper boys who merely have to flip the paper in the general direction of the front door.  With our horrible weather, I had to individually walk up to each front door,  flip the paper fold side down and slam the screen door or storm door closed before the paper hit bottom, hoping that it didn't get caught or unravel on the way down, which meant I'd have a do-over.    The paper bag weighed down hard on my shoulder, and I'd have to switch shoulders periodically from the pain of the strap digging in.  Sunday mornings at church I'd have a back ache, and it was kneel, stand, kneel, stand, sit kneel, and I was already exhausted, and then listen to Monsignor Daley with his patrician nose and his imperious tones giving us all holy hell like we were in one of his college lecture halls. 

Dogs were the bane of my existence.  Every day the same routine, the same dogs snarling and barking and giving me  a hard time.   There was a fat old wiener dog that would come out yapping and snapping  with her belly dragging on the ground that I could avoid with a few steps.  One Sunday morning an evil Great Dane mix from way up on Rt.370 kept me standing stock still for half an hour growling at my heel until it finally got bored and ambled off.    That dog had to be destroyed a week or so later after mauling a little baby.  In those times people simply let their dogs roam freely.  Most of them kept near their house, guarding against paper boys.   My salvation was our little boxer Sandy, who came along with me on the paper route and attacked and chased off any dog that threatened, no matter how big or mean, until one snowy day on the Main Road when she got confused between a dog across the road and me calling her back to me, and she was hit by a car and dragged 100 feet sliding down the icy road.    The driver insisted on taking her to a vet, in spite of my protests to find a rifle.  Poor Sandy never fully recovered from her skull fracture.  She was the best dog I ever had and it broke my heart to see her remaining days spent in suffering.

My dog Sandy watching over my little brother Stuart.  c. 1963

In better weather I had my trusty bike for delivering papers.    It was an American bike with fat tires, and handlebars like a Texas Longhorn steer.  It had a huge basket in front that could hold all the Sunday papers, but if I wasn't careful the weight could tip the whole bike over.  The long handlebars gave me a lot of leverage to keep things under control.  With my big bike I could deliver my route in about half the time of walking, so in summer I could get back home in time to catch Rocky and Bullwinkle before dinner. 

My first bike was a red 20-inch with a tank like a motorcycle.  I got it when we lived in the trailer and I was 6 or 7. My older brother pushed me along on it and then gave me a shove so I could coast until I crashed.  I finally went up our hill and coasted all by myself. Success.  I never had training wheels.   I think they're kinda dumb.  They're never adjusted correctly - the rear of the bike should almost ride on the trainers.  You almost always see them adjusted way too high, with the kid leaning way over and straining at the pedals.  Wrong.  After I outgrew that bike we made bikes from parts scrounged from other kids old bikes, or a bike we got from a police auction in Syracuse, or we traded stuff for a bike.  I inherited my big paper route bike from my brother. With the neighborhood gang we played bike tag, or capture the flag on bikes, and jumped over little ramps to get airborne. 

From the very beginning my Dad made it clear he was not going to fix our bikes, but he let us use his tools if we put them back. We had to learn how to fix flats, adjust and replace chains, change tires, adjust the handlebars and the bearings, tighten the spokes, and everything else.

One day I got home and plopped my big paper route bike bike down in the driveway, but my Dad had to go somewhere and he backed his car over my big bike.  Disaster.  There was no getting around it,  I had to take responsibility for being careless.  It meant I had to pull my savings from my paper route to buy myself a new bike.  Making $2 a week from my paper route, a new bike was going to be half a years' savings.  At my mother's suggestion  I bought a brand-new Hercules English bike from Montgomery Ward, my prized possession along with my transistor radio.

My Hercules bike was cherry red and bright chrome.  It had skinny tires, but it was only a single speed, not a three-speed like most English bikes, or a ten-speed like Guy Gardocki had.  That meant that climbing the hill back up from DeWitt Drive where he lived once a week was arduous, almost as slow as walking.     I kept it spotless and I polished that bike until the paint began to wear through.   She was a beauty.  I bough an aluminum kickstand for it, but it was a little too long, so I hacksawed a bit off the end, and then it was a little too short anfd the bike leaned way over so that I had to be careful or it would fall over. 

I bought a speedometer/odometer that ran off the front wheel, and over the next years put 10,000 miles on my bike.  It was my sole means of transportation until I left for college. I took it to high school dances and drove it to look for jobs miles away when I got a little older.

1963 Hercules single speed model like the one I had.  I took the chain guard off and put on a kickstand . 

One day one of my pedal cranks got loose and the pedal made a clunk every time I brought it up and around.  Unlike American bikes with a one-piece pedal crank, English bikes have a three-piece, with a center shaft and  two crank arms, each secured by a wedge bolt.  One of the wedge bolts loosened up, but I didn't realize you only had to tighten the nut that pulled the wedge bolt tighter.  I thought you had to drive the pin out from the other end, so I sat there with a hammer pounding on the wrong end of the wedge bolt , whacking it until it started rounding the end.  My father and my older brother came out and were laughing at me whacking away in total anger & frustration until I finally realized what I was doing wrong.

Once a week I collected money from my customers, and had to keep track in a little notebook of those who paid and those who came up short and had to be carried for a week or two - that was the limit.  I put the money in a bank money bag that zipped.  One night while walking along I discovered that if I flipped the bag in the air at an angle it would return like a boomerang, but after a few times I flipped it wrong and instead of returning, it sailed off and disappeared into a snowy weed field.  It got dark and I couldn't find it, so I went home and told Mom and she and I returned with flashlights and hunted around until we finally found it in the snow.   Close one.  That would have cleaned me out. 

My paper route was my only spending money, and as I mentioned, I used it for model cars, candy, hot dogs, donuts, school dances. and a fresh battery for my radio.  By the time I was a Junior in High School, I had saved $150 which got used up when I traveled to Germany as a foreign exchange student under the American Field Service exchange program. .